Among Plants

The exhibition entitled Among Plants presents artistic works that approach plants as active and adaptive organisms with their own agency—in short, as intelligent beings. Its focus is on modes of representation, media, and methods of contemporary art. The exhibition also occasionally draws attention to the past, showing that such examination of plants has a lengthy history that includes judicious use of knowledge from the natural sciences and other disciplines. Among Plants is the outcome of collaboration between the Museum Sinclair-Haus and the research project entitled Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant, which is based at the  Institute Art Gender Nature, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The exhibition marks the debut of three new artistic productions by Felipe Castelblanco, Julia Mensch, and Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits created in the project. Furthermore, it features two new works from project partners Ursula Damm and Ayênan Quinchoa Juajibioy.

With Felipe Castelblanco, Ursula Damm, Thorben Danke, Maya Deren & Tally Beatty, Mary Delany, Wim van Egmond, Kalle Hamm & Dzamil Kamanger, Kahn & Selesnick, Ernst Kreidolf, Debora Lombardi, Jesse McLean, Eduardo Kac, Julia Mensch, Max Reichmann, Mathilde Rosier, Omi-peah Ryding and Roman Schramm, Scenocosme, Ann Shelton, Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits, Kiki Smith, Una Szeemann, Mary Treat, Ayênan Quinchoa Juajibioy, and Lois Weinberger as well as exhibits from the natural sciences

Curated by Kathrin Meyer (Director of Museum Sinclair-Haus) and Yvonne Volkart (Head of the SNSF research project) with Moritz Ohlig and Sophie Olivotto (Museum Sinclair-Haus)

Since the early 2000s, the arts and humanities have been engaged with plants as independent organisms with their own intentions. Plants shape life on earth as we know it and they meet basic human needs in a variety of ways. However, knowledge about plants and direct contact with them have sharply declined because of industrialization, urbanization, the ubiquity of consumer technology and the consequent disconnect from the living world. At the same time, scientific research is affording insight into the complexity of plant perception and communication – fueling discussions about the idea of plant intelligence, also in relation to artificial intelligence. These new interpretations of plant life as well as the conviction that art can help to raise plant sensibility and to build new alliances between humans and plants have given rise to the present exhibition.

Among Plants revolves around questions including the following: How are plants depicted as sentient beings exercising their own agency? How can the characteristics of plant intelligence be explored with the help of the arts and sciences? What relationships do people build with plants in awareness of their vitality? How do the arts and sciences enter into dialogues in order to shed light on plants as active, learning life forms that are variously linked with their environments, with humans, fungi, bacteria, etc.? The first section, Encountering Plants, focuses on interactions between plants and humans. The second section, Plant Intelligence, explains how plants respond to light, how they grow, and how they adapt to their surroundings in myriad ways and thereby shape them. Engaging with plants also instills a sense of strangeness, for the physiological differences between humans and plants have us experience them as “different.” On one hand, the artworks in the show lend contour to this “otherness”; on the other, they speculatively probe similarities and interactions.

A magazine accompanies the exhibition, with texts by Michael Marder, Maurice Maggi, Estelle Zhong Mengual, Frederike Middelhoff, Sina Ribak, Birgit Schneider, Katja Tielbörger, and others (available at the museum).